cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2824472
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/singleguy79 on 2024-05-03 04:24:44.
click - your data is lost
I liked them anyways. The IDE drives were fast and cheap, CD-R was still too expensive.
.
Friend won a Zip drive at a computer conference and then we won a Jazz drive at the next one. He used iOmega stickers to write “Zip it” on his shirt. We used iOmega buttons to write “i Ω” across our shirts.
Used to see Iomega stuff advertised in PC magazines back in the day. Always wanted them but was impossible for me as a child to acquire that kind of hardware
I once spent weeks trying to get a scanner, a printer and a zip drive to work on a single parallel port. Needless to say, it was a fool’s errand. I ended up buying an ISA card with two extra parallel ports which after fiddling endlessly with interrupts kind of worked. Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
They were a nice alternative to the Syquest and Bernoulli disks we were using at the time–inasmuch as they were cheaper and I didn’t need to worry if the person I was going to send a file to had a 44, 88, 135 or 270 MB SyQuest: almost everyone had a Zip drive.
…but the click-of-death hurt them, and the ubiquity of CDRs and USB thumb drives was the real end.
Omg I’ve heard USB sticks be called “zip drives” before. I had no idea they were something entirely their own!
Remember MiniDisc? The one and only true storage medium! Hail MiniDisc!
IOMEGA! IOMEGA! ONE ZIP DISK TO RULE THEM ALL! ALL SHALL BOW!
But yeah. I may be nostalgic, but MiniDiscs were GOAT af, let’s be real.
It could’ve been a great computer storage medium, but it took far too long to be sold as such. By the time minidisc was being marketed as floppy/zip replacement, cd-Rs were a thing.
But minidiscs were so much cooler. They came in neon colours and you felt like a super hacker man when you clunked them into a player and used them for storing data rather than music.
Neo used MiniDisc in Matrix. 'Nuf said.
Mine was password protected and had Bulma’s boobs and incredibly confusing feelings stored on it
Yes. Hated them
The community college near me had zip drives on the library computers. I bought one primarily so I could download Netscape there and bring it home because doing it that way was faster than using our dialup connection.
The bandwidth’s okay, but the latency sucks.
That’s more or less how certain public clouds manage migrations in some cases.
I’ve watched a company load up 2PB of data into a tape library, have them stack it full of bubblewrap, then roll it onto the back of a truck with the tires deflated for a softer ride, then driven across town to a new datacentre at 3am on a Sunday.
Effective data rate: 1PB per hour.
No love for SyQuest round here?
You have to be a) old enough to have been working with very expensive machines in the late 80s and early 90s, but b) not so old that you’re a complete luddite.
I was in newspaper publishing, so yeah, I went through a 44, 88 and EZ135 drives. Zip 100s might not have been as quick, but they were a lot cheaper and they seemed more ubiquitous, where Syquest was kind of a crapshoot.
I have one in return: do you remember:
- the LS120 drive?
- Magneto-optical drives?
Holy shit, magneto-optical. Never had a drive, but I remember thinking it sounded so high tech.
You may have stumped me with the LS120. Ima have to look that one up.
